From the site:Hearthlands is a real-time strategy game best described as a mixture of City Building Series games and Majesty. It is set in medieval fantasy world. In the game you will need/be able to:— Build a medieval city— Keep your people happy by providing them with necessary resources and services— Gather resources and build industries— See reports and tune up your economy— Maintain relationships with AI rulers— Trade with your allies— Build an army and conquer your opponents— Expand your kingdom by establishing colonies— Explore the map, fight monsters, find artifacts and complete quest— Hire powerful heroes and level them up— Worship gods and get their blessings (or feel their wrath)— Build mega-constructions— Magic!

It does look very similar to the early Towns builds... although I'm seeing animal pens that appear to have custom sizes, and a couple of other interesting things that don't appear in either Towns, Majesty, or any other city-building games from before the latest "boom" in the genre.

It looks to me like it's taken the best bits from Majesty, the Impressions games (Zeus, Pharaoh etc.), and Age of Empires... which is an interesting and attractive combination in my book.

Although the name doesn't stand out so well, what with Hearthstone, Stonehearth, Hearthfire, and a bunch of other "hearth games" all in development

What's that you're eating? A nice, juicy apple? You weren't supposed to eat that you fool, you were supposed to make it into a pie! - last words recorded words of Francis D'Avre before he went looking for snowcherries, but found a hungry Yeti instead.

It looks like someone was annoyed by delayed City Mayor (or how it was supposed to be called).

Anyway, is there any good city-builder/town-management strategy out there, that is already completed? Or in decent state of production?

It seems that most of those games, just like town, have major problems with production as well.

Clockwork Empires is coming up through its Early Access phase; it's a long way from "done" but, by all accounts, they're at least doing it right...

Banished is about the only other candidate that springs to mind, it's much more of a "town survival" game than a "grow and manage your settlement" - it's a constant fight against all the internal pressures tearing your town apart, and the only goal is to get bigger and bigger without imploding; but most players seem to agree that it's well polished in what it does do.

What's that you're eating? A nice, juicy apple? You weren't supposed to eat that you fool, you were supposed to make it into a pie! - last words recorded words of Francis D'Avre before he went looking for snowcherries, but found a hungry Yeti instead.

Colombo wrote:Yeah, but Cockwork Empires should have been originally released at the end of the last year, shouldn't they?

And Banished... It is very polished game, but at the same time, very hollow. Once you get how you should progress and what to build, it is supposedly very easy.

Gaslamp made the decision to hold CE back because it wasn't ready; now they're pushing what they call "earliest access" which is really just an expansion of their hardware tests - they want to test a very very bare-bones game "in the wild" to pick up on any core problems that didn't come up in the unit tests, and then move to something more like an alpha process adding new features.

They have a weekly blog that's quite a good read; both from a technical/development perspective and also quite in-depth about the design choices and why they're doing the things they're doing. I can't recommend that blog enough; it's just great and a great example of how to keep a fanbase informed.

I guess one other option for "town management", although it comes a bit out of left field, would be to look at some Minecraft mods like Millenaire or Minecolonies - nowhere near as much depth as a traditional top-down management game, but a fair bit more "active" and challenging in their own way. Less spreadsheets; more running away, screaming, from the invading monsters

What's that you're eating? A nice, juicy apple? You weren't supposed to eat that you fool, you were supposed to make it into a pie! - last words recorded words of Francis D'Avre before he went looking for snowcherries, but found a hungry Yeti instead.